Pandora: First Contact is shaping up to look a lot like Civ5 in space. It was announced last year but I can't seem to find a release date as yet (hopefully soon). Adam Solo at Space Sector was lucky enough to get his hands on a beta version and posted his thoughts here.

There's some interesting points of note outside of the normal "it's a 4X, it does 4x stuff" observations;

In Pandora, you do have an idea on what each tech purpose is, and what sort of outcome it may unlock. But, while each tech describes what future tech it leads to, it’s somewhat hard to have a sense of what needs to be researched in order to reach a certain more desired and more advanced tech. It’s not the same as going with Alpha Centauri’s blind tech progression, where you can only choose a research area but not the tech itself, but still a somewhat more mysterious way to unlock new techs.

As a person who can deliberate over tech tree decisions ad nauseam, the vagueness could be a good way of quickening my decisions and it's also a interesting way of presenting the unknown in scientific research.

There is also the ability to customize units;

This is done through the game mechanic called “Workshop”, and you can create and customize your own designs by choosing from a pre-defined set of classes and then choose your favorite weapon and armor configurations. Each weapon comes with its own modifiers, which makes some units more suitable to fight biological, mechanical or airborne enemies, the types of units I discovered so far.

The new screenshots from the beta also show that the game has moved from a square to hexagon based grid and also looking a bit more spiffy in general.